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I am a beginner learning how to load data and I can't figure out why I can't load this data into postgres. I am using postgres 8.4 on MAC OS.

copy tname from '/Users/Shared/folder/file.cxv' DELIMITERS ',' CSV;

ERROR: could not open file "/Users/Shared/folder/file.csv" for reading: Permission denied.

I checked and have reading/writing privileges for this file.

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Is the file world readable, and are the directory permissions correct to enable the postgres user to read the file? – Phil Feb 12 at 19:54
I'm not sure how to check directory permissions. The file is readable. – user1657563 Feb 12 at 22:40
The same way you check file permissions... – Phil Feb 12 at 22:45
-rw-r--r-- 1 Tim Tim 988650610 Feb 12 14:08 cts.20130208.csv I also checked the directory permissions. – user1657563 Feb 12 at 23:42
Well, what is your file name after all? This latter ls output refers to what? What do you get running ls -ld /Users/Shared/folder? – dezso Feb 13 at 8:39

closed as too localized by dezso, Max Vernon, Mark Storey-Smith, RolandoMySQLDBA, Marian Apr 15 at 18:53

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1 Answer

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in general, you should use \copy where you can in psql instead of COPY since that wraps COPY FROM STDIN. Where you want to copy from a file, you can wrap that yourself in your own application (specifics dependent on language but see the Pg docs).

The alternative is to put files somewhere that the Postgres user can access them, like /tmp/ and COPY from there. Of course this means the files must be present on whatever system the db server is running on, rather than the system the client is running on if using the previous paragraph's methods. Chances are your problem is either the immediate directory the file is in or a parent directory. Keeping these in a spool directory which is more general will help manage this problem.

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